Protect phone customers

Our opinion: Cable companies should have the same constraints as other utilities when it comes to cutting people’s phone service for non-payment.

Cable service brings a lot of cool things into people’s homes — things whose interruption might be inconvenient and annoying, but not likely a matter of life and death.

But there’s one feature that many New Yorkers get through cable that’s essential: a telephone connection.

It’s imperative that the state Public Service Commission — which is under pressure from the state’s largest cable provider, Time Warner, to change the rules — not lose sight of that difference.

We’re not talking about a few homes. A third of Time Warner’s nearly 15 million residential subscribers get telephone service through their cable.

Unlike other services that companies like Time Warner offer — such as TV, Internet, security and remote lighting and heating control — the home telephone holds special status. It has long been regarded as an essential utility, much like residential gas, water and electricity. The PSC regulates how and when a utility can cut a customer off such a critical service for failure to pay a bill on time.

For years, Time Warner maintained it was not a phone company and should not be bound by these rules. That changed earlier this year when it accepted the responsibilities and regulations that come with being a residential phone provider.

Now, though, Time Warner is petitioning the PSC to change the rules governing home phone bills.

Some of the requests appear reasonable, such as updating language about local and long-distance calling charges. But that’s not the case with Time Warner’s request to expand the hours and days when it can disconnect services for customers who have fallen behind in their bills, including their phone service.

Specifically, Time Warner wants to deal with delinquent customers on nights and weekends.

Most other utility providers can cut service for non-payment only during weekdays, when the PSC’s staff is working and available to help broker solutions and protect consumers. The PSC has the authority to make decisions on disputed bills, revise payment plan arrangements and remedy situations where continued service is medically necessary.

Late and unpaid bills are admittedly a chronic problem for cable companies. In the past year, Time Warner sent more than 1.7 million past-due notices to residential customers in the state and shut off or suspended service to nearly 600,000 households for failing to pay bills.

Time Warner calls its proposed change a convenience to its customers. It’s really a convenience for Time Warner, which wants to handle phone bills the same as other services. But this would bypass the special safeguards for phone consumers.

The PSC should reject this proposal, and companies like Time Warner should get used the idea that being a phone company carries a substantially larger responsibility than the Saturday morning cartoons.

3 Responses

I’d like to recommend a new social safety net program. the Affordable Phone Act. it will work like this. Low to moderate income families and individuals will get free phone service and the middle class and wealthy will all be charged a $59.99 a month surcharge on our phone bills o sponsor someone that can’t pay their bill.

It sounds like the perfect plan. then each state can set up an exchange that will have 4 different tiers of phone service and the have not’s can go to the exchange and pick a platinum, gold, silver or bronze phone plan.

Young adults that don’t need a land line will be forced to get one or pay a fine on an annual basis.

How can something like that be regulated? What about people that have cell phones, or another VoIP provider. What would happen if I failed to pay my ISP and they cut off service and thereby what ever service I was using for VoIP. Seems to me to have to many branches and to be fair to Time Warner why should they alone be singled out. Personally I knew all the risks I was taking when I turned off my copper line years ago, poor cell reception, Internet outage etc… I knew what I was risking…

@2 – Most people do not know the true risks or the fact that the PSC can help with disputed bills from a copper wire telephone company.

I’ve never had to dispute a bill with my copper wire telephone company. The lack of PSC protection with a cable company is the main reason why I will NOT have phone service through a cable company. Go to arbitration? NO THANKS.